To begin with, Schoenberg worked in a bank, but he never thought of anything other than music. ‘Once, in the army, I was asked if I was the composer Arnold Schoenberg. “Somebody has to be,” I said, “and nobody else wanted to be, so I took it on myself.” ‘25 Although Schoenberg preferred Vienna, where he frequented the cafés Landtmann and Griensteidl, and where Karl Kraus, Theodor Herzl and Gustav Klimt were great friends, he realised that Berlin was the place to advance his career. There he studied under Alexander von Zemlinsky, whose sister, Mathilde, he married in 1901.26
Schoenberg’s autodidacticism, and sheer inventiveness, served him well. While other composers, Strauss, Mahler, and Claude Debussy among them, made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth to learn from Wagner’s chromatic harmony, Schoenberg chose a different course, realising that evolution in art proceeds as much by complete switchbacks in direction, by quantum leaps, as by gradual growth.27 He knew that the expressionist painters were trying to make visible the distorted and raw forms unleashed by the modern world and analysed and ordered by Freud. He aimed to do something similar in music. The term he himself liked was ‘the emancipation of dissonance.’28
Schoenberg once described music as ‘a prophetic message revealing a higher form of life toward which mankind evolves.’29 Unfortunately, he found his own evolution slow and very painful. Even though his early music owed a debt to Wagner, Tristan especially, it had a troubled reception in Vienna. The first demonstrations occurred in 1900 at a recital. ‘Since then,’ he wrote later, ‘the scandal has never ceased.’30 It was only after the first outbursts that he began to explore dissonance. As with other ideas in the early years of the century – relativity, for example, and abstraction – several composers were groping toward dissonance and atonality at more or less the same time. One was Strauss, as we have seen. But Jean Sibelius, Mahler, and Alexandr Scriabin, all older than Schoenberg, also seemed about to embrace the same course when they died. Schoenberg’s relative youth and his determined, uncompromising nature meant that it was he who led the way toward atonality.31
One morning in December 1907 Schoenberg, Anton von Webern, Gustav Klimt, and a couple of hundred other notables gathered at Vienna’s Westbahnhof to say good-bye to Gustav Mahler, the composer and conductor who was bound for New York. He had grown tired of the ‘fashionable anti-Semitism’ in Vienna and had fallen out with the management of the Opéra.32 As the train pulled out of the station, Schoenberg and the rest of the Café Griensteidl set, now bereft of the star who had shaped Viennese music for a decade, waved in silence. Klimt spoke for them all when he whispered, ‘Vorbei’ (It’s over). But it could have been Schoenberg speaking – Mahler was the only figure of note in the German music world who understood what he was trying to achieve.33 A second crisis which faced Schoenberg was much more powerful. In the summer of 1908, the very moment of his first atonal compositions, his wife Mathilde abandoned him for a friend.34 Rejected by his wife, isolated from Mahler, Schoenberg was left with nothing but his music. No wonder such dark themes are a prominent feature of his early atonal compositions.
The year 1908 was momentous for music, and for Schoenberg. In that year he composed his Second String Quartet and Das Buch der hängenden Gärten. In both compositions he took the historic step of producing a style that, echoing the new physics, was ‘bereft of foundations.’35 Both compositions were inspired by the tense poems of Stefan George, another member of the Café Griensteidl set.36 George’s poems were a cross between experimentalist paintings and Strauss operas. They were full of references to darkness, hidden worlds, sacred fires, and voices.
The precise point at which atonality arrived, according to Schoenberg, was during the writing of the third and fourth movements of the string quartet. He was using George’s poem ‘Entrückung’ (Ecstatic Transport) when he suddenly left out all six sharps of the key signature. As he rapidly completed the part for the cello, he abandoned completely any sense of key, to produce a ‘real pandemonium of sounds, rhythms and forms.’37 As luck would have it, the stanza ended with the line, ‘Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten,’ ‘I feel the air of other planets.’ It could not have been more appropriate.38 The Second String Quartet was finished toward the end of July. Between then and its premiere, on 21 December, one more personal crisis shook the Schoenberg household. In November the painter his wife had left him for hanged himself, after he had failed to stab himself to death. Schoenberg took back Mathilde, and when he handed the score to the orchestra for the rehearsal, it bore the dedication, ‘To my wife.’39
The premiere of the Second String Quartet turned into one of the great scandals of music history. After the lights went down, the first few bars were heard in respectful silence. But only the first few. Most people who lived in apartments in Vienna then carried whistles attached to their door keys. If they arrived home late at night, and the main gates of the building were locked, they would use the whistles to attract the attention of the concierge. On the night of the première, the audience got out its whistles. A wailing chorus arose in the auditorium to drown out what was happening onstage. One critic leaped to his feet and shouted, ‘Stop it! Enough!’ though no one knew if he meant the audience or the performers. When Schoenberg’s sympathisers joined in, shouting their support, it only added to the din. Next day one newspaper labelled the performance a ‘Convocation of Cats,’ and the New Vienna Daily, showing a sense of invention that even Schoenberg would have approved, printed their review in the ‘crime’ section of the paper.40 ‘Mahler trusted him without being able to understand him.’41
Years later Schoenberg conceded that this was one of the worst moments of his life, but he wasn’t deterred. Instead, in 1909, continuing his emancipation of dissonance, he composed Erwartung, a thirty-minute opera, the story line for which is so minimal as to be almost absent: a woman goes searching in the forest for her lover; she discovers him only to find that he is dead not far from the house of the rival who has stolen him. The music does not so much tell a story as reflect the woman’s moods – joy, anger, jealousy.42 In painterly terms, Erwartung is both expressionistic and abstract, reflecting the fact that Schoenberg’s wife had recently abandoned him.43 In addition to the minimal narrative, it never repeats any theme or melody. Since most forms of music in the ‘classical’ tradition usually employ variations on themes, and since repetition, lots of it, is the single most obvious characteristic of popular music, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and Erwartung stand out as the great break, after which ‘serious’ music began to lose the faithful following it had once had. It was to be fifteen years before Erwartung was performed.
Although he might be too impenetrable for many people’s taste, Schoenberg was not obtuse. He knew that some people objected to his atonality for its own sake, but that wasn’t the only problem. As with Freud (and Picasso, as we shall see), there were just as many traditionalists who hated what he was saying as much as how he was saying it. His response to this was a piece that, to him at least, was ‘light, ironic, satirical.’44 Pierrot lunaire, appearing in 1912, features a familiar icon of the theatre – a dumb puppet who also happens to be a feeling being, a sad and cynical clown allowed by tradition to raise awkward truths so long as they are wrapped in riddles. It had been commissioned by the Viennese actress Albertine Zehme, who liked the Pierrot role.45 Out of this unexpected format, Schoenberg managed to produce what many people consider his seminal work, what has been called the musical equivalent of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or E=mc2.46 Pierrot’s main focus is a theme we are already familiar with, the decadence and degeneration of modern man. Schoenberg introduced in the piece several innovations in form, notably Sprechgesang, literally songspeech in which the voice rises and falls but cannot be said to be either singing or speaking. The main part, composed for an actress rather than a straight singer, calls for her to be both a ‘serious’ performer and a cabaret act. Despite this suggestion of a more popular, accessible format, listeners have found that the music breaks down ‘into atoms and molecules, behaving in a jerky, uncoordinated way not unlike the molecules that bombard pollen in Brownian movement.’47